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Mary Cantwell

Published: September 7, 1989

SUNDAY is a peculiar day. The hours yawn, the streets are quiet, the newspapers pile up and swallow the furniture.

Sunday stills me. Granddaughter of a woman who thought it sinful to so much as lift one's hands from one's lap on a Sunday, I am made motionless by my memory of her, in the rose-colored crepe she wore to church sitting placid in her rocker. She will fix dinner, but that is all, and afterward she will return to the rocker and stare down the setting sun. God rested on the seventh day, and so will she. To do otherwise would be to flout Him.

To some extent, I do what she does. I read the Sunday papers on Saturday night, staying up until my eyes are sandy because it leaves the morrow free. On the next day I make my bed, thus covering the household chores, and if I expect dinner guests I spend several happy hours in the kitchen. But I seldom have guests on Sunday. To my daughter, bliss is a New Jersey mall on a Sunday afternoon. Most of my friends are in the country; those that aren't are blanketed - straitjacketed even - by those all-enveloping newspapers. Almost always I am alone.

What to do? What is permissible? I write. I read. I watch television, reruns, mostly, and old movies. Sometimes I call my mother and my aunt. They aren't doing much either: my grandmother, quiet in her rocker, is in their mind's eye, too. Finally, at around three o'clock, I take my walk.

Farther east the tourists and the children who arrived by subway are strolling along Eighth Street, Greenwich Village's version of a New Jersey mall, but my neighborhood is banked in Sunday silence. True, the transvestite prostitutes are working, tall and striking in their current uniform - leotard and flowing robe - but traffic is light and business is off. The bus dispatcher, with few buses to dispatch, is sitting on a fire hydrant. A few customers are picking at their tacos in the Mexican restaurant near the river, and a few sunbathers have dared the rickety docks.

Usually such desolation is curiously soothing, a drop of morphine for the soul. But last Sunday, with the air as damp as a dishrag, I wanted madder music and stronger wine. I wanted the flea market.

On a similarly damp, gray Sunday a long time ago I strolled the Paris flea markets with two friends. Each of us bought something, if only to have a souvenir, and we ate lunch in a steamy restaurant where all the men seemed to be wearing plaid pompon hats. One older man sipped my wine accidentally, apologized profusely and said: ''That means you can now see into my head. And I assure you I am thinking only beautiful thoughts.'' Walking up an empty Avenue of the Americas, I remembered that lovely Sunday and told myself I was going aux puces.

Instead of a restaurant that promised jambon de Bayonne and a modest Beaujolais, there were two curbside carts. At one a man hawked coffee; at the other a woman fished zeppole out of a deep fryer. There were no stalls, only tables under big umbrellas, and admission, through an opening in a wire fence, was a dollar. The conversations were the same, though - ''Sorry, that's my price'' and ''I've never seen another like it'' - and so, for the most part, was the crowd. Bargain hunters. Treasure hunters. Young women with the kind of carved haircuts that announced they were in the fashion business. Young men with the kind of blowy trousers that announced they were either in the fashion business or waiters at a happening downtown restaurant. Little children who wanted to go home.

The wares, some of them pristine and more of them very tired, constituted 60 years of life in America. There were evening purses from the 1920's and kitchen furniture from the 1930's, a framed photograph of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, and a Howdy Doody puppet. There was a lunch box from the 1950's and a plastic box that held a handbag from, I suppose, the 1940's. My hand hovered over a 1939 World's Fair paper needle case, complete with rusted needles, and moved on. Next it hovered over a square plate painted with a bouquet of flowers, several books and a tablecloth. The dealer said he'd come down $2 - not my idea of a lure.

''Somewhere in that box, the one at the right, I've got a picture of General Grant's funeral procession,'' a dealer who sold old postcards said. The customer was in a swoon. She scrabbled through the shoebox, she found the card. Sold!

''Don't tell me about doorstops. Don't tempt me with doorstops. I don't ever want to see let alone buy another doorstop.'' A man was talking to a dealer whom, clearly, he knew. It was just as clear that the dealer knew him. She had, she said, an Art Deco doorstop and she would bring it next week. He was tempted. She had triumphed. ''How much?'' I asked about a curious piece of copper, rolled up at the bottom, with a cutout of a boy waving a newspaper in its center. ''$250,'' the dealer said, his eyes fixed on his fingernails. My eyes widened. I had been willing to go as high as $15.

The afternoon was grayer and damper than ever when I trudged along the Avenue of the Americas again, this time heading home. I had said four words all day: ''How much,'' twice. I had spent $1. That night the telephone would ring - my daughter with a report from the New Jersey malls and a friend who'd say ''What's new?'' - and my voice, so little used, would crack in the answering. But I had rested. I had observed the seventh day. And although it wasn't Paris, where I had been was fine.